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webshit weekly

An annotated digest of the top "Hacker" "News" posts for the second week of October, 2016.

How We Built the World’s Prettiest Auto-Generated Transit MapsOctober 08, 2016(comments)
A company offloaded transit line rendering to their users' battery-powered pocket computers. It shows you most of a train network using colors that don't match the ones in the train stations. It does not show you which direction a train travels or whether there are non-train connections between adjacent stations. Hackernews would like to order printed wall-sized copies of inaccurate maps incapably derived from public datasets. Someone calls it 'data science.'

A gentle introduction to Prolog (2013)October 09, 2016(comments)
Presented: an inexplicably coherent introduction to Prolog. Hackernews complains that Prolog is hard to use if you are bad at Prolog. Everybody is mad at cut. Lots of people immediately confuse logic programming with functional programming; therefore, in accordance with federal law, someone mentions Rust.

SQL style guideOctober 10, 2016(comments)
An internet registers a vanity domain to present a list of rules in a doomed attempt to make the unending hell of working with SQL slightly less unbearable. The document cites itself as a reference. Hackernews engages in its hourly pedantry festival and eventually insists that every single recommendation is wrong and that this document is wonderful.

Git-repo – Manage Gitlab, GitHub and Bitbucket from the command lineOctober 11, 2016(comments)
Someone decides that git's problem is that it has too much syntax, so they extend git's syntax to fix it. Hackernews suggests six thousand other nearly-identical tools, then complains about them. A Hackernews is worried that backticks are (needlessly) employed in this tool, because his Arch Linux install does not have any authorization controls on the 'poweroff' command.

Say Cheese: a snapshot of the massive DDoS attacks coming from IoT camerasOctober 12, 2016(comments)
Camera manufacturers have put wifi in everything and it turns out camera manufacturers are not very good at network security. Hackernews is a very experienced IT professional and has predicted this. They hold up Google products as models to follow. It is not clear why. Hackernews believes Cloudflare will solve all their problems. Cloudflare agrees this is likely; please click here to apply for a job figuring out how.

Barack Obama on A.I., Autonomous Cars, and the Future of HumanityOctober 13, 2016(comments)
Someone considers Barack Obama, a politician whose largest undertaking involved a failed healthcare IT deployment, and member of a political party known for hemorrhaging private data, eminently qualified to discuss safe policies for artificial intelligence practice. Hackernews divides into two groups. The first group performs the traditional election-cycle political shit opera for six hours. The second group debates whether artificial intelligence will kill us all, or whether everything will turn out fine just as long as we continue to monitor the living shit out of every single human being alive, in order to feed the machines. A Hackernews suspects Obama quoted Mao, and everyone reassures each other it's probably fine.

Cooled Nikon D5500a Chills the Sensor for Clearer Star PhotosOctober 14, 2016(comments)
Nikon refrigerates a camera to reduce noise in photographs. Hackernews suggest several improvements, all of which have already been implemented and are described in the article. Nobody suggests refrigerating the Hackernews population, despite the almost guaranteed reduction of noise that would result.